Firearms
Firearms development is very uneven in Vosca. The Burdinadin are largely to blame for this, as they've already developed self-loading rotatory gun emplacements and semi-practical breach-loading rifles. Of course, they don't share these willingly, and even if they did, humans have a hard time reverse-engineering Burdinadin weapons because so many of the principles are just beyond their grasp of chemical and metallurgical science to replicate, but they can steal basic concepts and simple mechanisms. The most common sort of gun is the arquebus, but heavy arquebuses, which we would call muskets, were developed in Galli. The existence of bulletproof armor sort of necessitates this kind of development. Wheellocks were developed in the Kaselreich, and are now the favored striking mechanism for those who can afford them. Most of these guns are matchlock or wheellock. Burdinadin guns use a sort of contained matchlock system where a piece of wire is kept incandescently hot with stored electricity, the end-point of decades of developing matchlock mechanisms. The Burdinadin designed a rotatory gun capable of firing 200 rounds per minute, but the project was canceled because they were afraid of what might happen if humans discovered one and reverse engineered it. In Karthack, the favored kind of gun is the hand-bombard, which are used to fire grenades at long distances. The Karthacks are generally disdainful of arquebuses and muskets, preferring their bows to such tomfoolery. In the Reich, pistols were developed for use by cavalry, and these have taken off across the continent, being used extensively in Illegon and Krajina in a variety of roles. The Kasel Engineering Guild has developed a sort of auto-arquebus that uses internal machinery to reload itself with one turn of a crank from internal magazines of powder and shot. It doesn't have the sheer rate of fire of the Dacian device, but it is more sustainable, much lighter, and doesn't require heavy interchangeable cylinders. In Dace, Ruddock Industries (a production house in Taphonomy Bay) developed the "Zalmoxis," an arquebus with a stock and ring sights. The weapon itself is low quality trash, but it was exported in huge numbers, and the concept of shoulder-stocks is just now catching on in the rest of Vosca. The Dacians developed large high caliber muskets with a five-shot revolving cylinder that they reverse-engineered from a Burdinadin weapon... But the device weighs thirty pounds, and is impossible to fire except from a mount. They put them on top of track-wagons. The cylinder also cannot be reloaded while inside the weapon, so it has to be replaced with another cylinder that has been pre-loaded. The Ruvians have something a bit like an Abus gun. Think of an antitank rifle, and you'd have a good idea of what these are. Huge caliber muskets mounted on stands, designed so that the firer receives none of the recoil of actually firing, and balanced on a rest so that they can make fine-tuned adjustment without bearing the weight of a weapon. In other words, a modernized Scorpion. These typically accompany the Legions and are used to kill important looking men and pick enemies off of walls. A few of the newer ones have begun to be fitted with telescopic lenses. There is also something called a "Canister Rifle" that the Osterbs have come up with. One might consider it to be the forerunner of a breech-loading musket, except that instead of a cartridge, the entire action (including the priming pan) is removed from the weapon, and an entirely new "canister" is placed and locked in. This is definitely faster than going through the whole muzzle-loading song and dance, but it is enormously expensive, as the canisters have to be custom-made for the weapon, and can generally only be used once each during a battle. The Osterbs swear by them, but after a few volleys, the men will often end up reloading the expensive weapons conventionally rather than risk slipping up and losing a 12 sp canister. Category:Science & Culture